: I just read about this. It was an article from a site that I
: felt was credible.

Understood, Raye - and as I wrote earlier, I'm not saying it is not true; I'm saying I can't know that it _is_ true. :)

Until a few years ago it was "common knowledge" (as in, "_Everybody_ knows _that_!") that large amounts of vitamin C "have been shown to contribute to the forming of kidney stones".

A cyber-friend of mine, Michael Janson, M.D., who was then president of American College for Advancement in Medicine, decided it was time to look into this common knowledge, because he had first-hand evidence that large amounts of vitamin C are clearly user-friendly otherwise.

What he found, finally, was that this common knowledge, appearing in books and journals all over the place, was coming entirely from one very badly designed, badly flawed study that someone had done, and the results had been published in "one of the good journals".

So what everybody "knew" didn't really have a leg to stand on. :)

We get the idea that "history is written by the victors". We get the idea that books of the Bible were removed from it at different times in the past 2000 years, and possibly that various editorial modifications have been made to it "so the common people will understand what it _means_", etc.

But there's a curious tendency in most of us to believe that, if it appears in _print_ (or on television), it must have been reviewed and verified by many fine "experts", and we can trust it to a greater degree than if we'd heard about it orally from, say, our cousin Chester who lives in the next county. :)

But "history is written by the winners" is also a factor that should come into play on this one.

Some of us heard, when we were young, that there was Something Awful (e.g., "the boogie man" or other designations) in the world, and that if we weren't "good children" some magical sensing device owned by this Something Awful would guide him to us and terrible things would be done (e.g., "...will cut off your nose!", or "...will steal you and carry you off!")

As adults we can understand that these frightening admonitions were being delivered either in the true interesting of keeping us safe from dangers we weren't expecting - OR as excessive and exaggerated methods to keep our behavior in line with what some adults _wanted_ it to be, for their self-centered reasons rather than truly for our own good.

NONE OF THIS MEANS THAT WHAT YOU READ ABOUT DIDN'T REALLY HAPPEN; AND NONE OF IT MEANS IT WASN'T A VERY WIDESPREAD PRACTICE ALSO.

All I'm saying is, having read it doesn't make it true; knowing-about is not knowing; and whatever history we have available to us was written by whoever was around and still alive to write it and to embellish it to make "our side" look the way they wanted it to look.

I think it's possible that some of the "horror stories" from out of the past may be based on "What Everyone Knows About The Heathens" at the time the stories were first written down.